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Ascolo Parodites
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Aliis, quia defit quod amant, aegre'st; tibi,
quia supereft, dolet.
Amore abundas, Antipho;
nam tua quidem, hercle, certo Vita haec expetenda optandaque est.
Satiety is the root of your complaint.
- Terence, Phormio.
Non ebur neque aureum
mea renidet in domo lacunar;
non trabes Hymettiae
premunt columnas ultima recisas
Africa, neque Attali
ignotus heres regiam occupaui,
nec Laconicas mihi
trahunt honestae purpuras clientae.
- Horace, Epodes.
Rejoice in the flesh, you Virtuosi and Philosophers, that superordinates for what the Lord lacks in his own afflictions! Make use of this sleep which the Lord our God lets to fall upon you, to build from the rib of Endymion the latest edition of the human soul; to wrestle with the Idea of Natural History under the carnality which you cannot efface. For your animal nature lends hands, eye, and foot to your abstractions as well as to your hypothesis, and there are no faster inferences then the memoria baptismi of Images and Passions, - whilst in a vain contract send for Philological marbles, like the Poet sent for new-earth from over the ocean. A man can only act or suffer by analogy to his own nature, therefor if an angel desires to work through our tongues in communicatio, it must condescend to us. All such workings must, like the talking animals of Homer's Melampus, express themselves analogously to human nature, - virtutum autem pariunt ardua & illustria, et propria gulae vicisse and externa lenocinia, in idiomatum or peristaseis, that is, demonstratively and revelatorily. [Chylosophiae, p. 319.] Careful! The next age shall awake from it's stupor in the books of palling ancients, and the kolasis of history, to exult your Muse and give to her this message: your flesh is of my flesh, your bone is of my bone. One may observe for himself the manifestations of the passions everywhere in human society; as everything, no matter how remote, strikes upon the mind in a certain affect; as every individual sensation extends over the compass of all external objects, blowing up every laical situation into a public spectacle of heaven and earth, vacuam palpant onerosa mole metretam. [Beronici Georgarchontomachia] If the stomach is your God then even the hairs on your head are under it's Daimona oicheion (which we might call Socratic Grace) whilst even the colors of the fairest world pale when the first-born of creation is quenched. [Olearius in Philosophica De Socratis Daemonio] In short, the conception and birth of thoughts; the genethlialogia and astrologia of the ancients, the work and rest of the wise, lie in the fruitful womb of the passions buried before our senses. Man's godliness is not abdicated by his Sin for all denial is intelligible only in terms of some affirmation, - [axiom in Duns Scotus] Man must seek himself throughout creatures in Falling from the image of God, and by counter-example with them, come to acknowledge the natural world as a license to his own divinity; that is to say, the Body of Christ is itself to be recalled in Creation, wherein God has exposed himself to the creature through the creature. Suspicion has been raised, that God be oriented to humanity, because humanity is too much like a child to orient itself to God; and therefor God has acted that it should be easier for us to put our faith in him, then it were to humanize him, and ourselves become Apollos. If one single truth rules like the sun, there is Justice; that is day. Foolish if you see in place of this single truth as many as the sands upon the shores of the sea, - or walk in the ascetic and visible habit ofthe Greeks, that were a mere prolepsis in moralis habita ratione, [Klippel in commentatio exhibens doctrinae Stoicorum ethicae atque Christianae] for the one garment of light [Psalms] surpasseth a whole host of suns in splendor. Speak that I may see you! This hope of Socrates was fulfilled in creation qua vult regulas practicas necessariae; veritatis observari a creatura. -- [Sebastianus Summa Theologiae Scotisticae] Our ancestors for seven days sat in silence of reflection or wonder nihil in robustam sapientia mentem sirenes omnes posse, [... Democritum me putate, & tacita saltem cachinni censura mollissimos pros -- Erycius in Comus, Phagesiposia Cimmeria] and opened their mouths merely to perform the office of the eyes and hand. [Entheticus Maior, part 46.] For as God happily clothed us in leaves, when the intuition of Posterity had taught us shame; yet he knew that as sinners we could not approach his image, no less in a sherd of Earthen pots. [Isaiah] Though if the possibility, however remote, of redemption in this life were wholly abjured, the human spirit would become a vis abdita quaedam, such that the creation of the mise-en-scene would relate to humanity as epic to dramatic poetry; the former though the Word, the latter through the Deed. If the passions are members of dishonor, do they cease to be the forerunners of the muse's affliction, and consequentially weapons of manhood, in dispossession over Athena's counsil? da che a noi la donna precorrendo le Muse era tornata per consiglio di Pallade. [Ugo Foscolo, Legrazie.] If so, then have you put out your own eyes with Epicurus; do you truss yourself with Stoicisms, and make aim to persuade the human race, under your pillar of salt, - that Nature herself is blind? All the most complicated knots of human nature are resolved in the acknowledgment of our relation to the invisible God. A thirsting ambition for truth and virtue, a fury to conquer all lies and vice, which precisely are not recognized as such; this is the heroism of the philosopher, this the power of criticism which is the ability to recognize and to appropriate good and evil. Nature is given to us to open our eyes, History to open our ears; in the condescension of an angel, will not the divine plan become a mens auctoris? The sensible Eden is descended after the Light that is insensible; the senses do not exist merely to receive the world, they exist precisely because they receive the world. Thus the kat exochen of philosophy, as Bacon himself will affirm, is not abstraction but rather the middoth ha-adam of God's adumbration of human ethical qualities. One must conceive of Nature to enter into that History which transforms the Night of Egypt into the Day of Goschen. Though, the questioning into our similitude with God must finally result in a transcendental evaluation of our selves, that is of our finite and thinking selves, in a negative dialectics of the transcendence of the Soul over the animal nature, to a merely ancillary extent, in the division of labor; though properly, if we are not to hold the beautiful fasces like a plaything, which must be conceived within the immanence of our Sin and Fall. [Theodoro Adorno.] If one presupposes God as the origin of all actions in the great and in the small, or in heaven and on earth; then every numbered hair on our heads is just as divine as Behemoth and Leviathan, that were the beginning and the end of the ways of God. The spirit of the Principia of Moses extends itself therefor even upon the offenses of the human corpse. Consequently all is divine, and the implication of the New Testament, that we cannot walk to Paradise ex condigno, turns in the end to a play of words. The fabled ugliness of Socrates had never such eclat as the aesthetic beauty of Aesop the younger. True, sunt geminae somni porta, one can be a man and dwell hopefully at the gate of ivory, without becoming a poet, or passing by the gate of horns for true dreams. Therefor do not venture into the metaphysics of the fine arts without being initiated into the orgies and Eleusinian mysteries. Everything divine, however, is also human; for while a human can only act or suffer by analogy to his own nature, therefor the principle of our entire visible economy is endued in the sudden apprehension,- whereof one must be attentive in every human utterance to the idiomatum of human character, as the only vehicle for grasping the communicatio of spirits. The move from nature to history, thus subjected to the laws of aesthetic probability, suggests that the cause for the Fall of Adam was his development from a natural understanding to a greed for moral knowledge. [Mendelssohn, Bacon. Before History can serve the good Adam for a beau ideal of morality, it must be subjected to the laws of aesthetic probability.] This nature, human nature, is not obvious but concealed,- is written upon the head like the mark of Cain, ex analogia veterum. Man is the spirit wherein he worked: he is not what he hath done, he is that he hath became, - altera mana fert lapidem, altera panem ostendit. [Mor Ballagi] Under the tribulation of Time, with all spiritual destitutions belonging to it, has the Man-Prophet, in telluris inutile pondus, endured silently in his heart. The greatest misery is to be aware of your own weaknesses; (Unkraft) ever in our weaknesses lust counsels one thing, reason another; dossenus edacibus in parasitis, and there begins new reluctancy in men. Although of one's moral or spiritual strength there is no clear feeling whereof to be judged, yet there is no vacillation for which we cannot find solace in the thought- this be a part of my constitution, a part in the office of my relations to my fellow creatures, and thereof a part in mine anores Marathonomachoi: permit me to give thee no Love, Lord, if I love thee not, and endure my ignotum tragicae genus. A certain inarticulate Self-Consciousness dwells dimly within us, which only by our works can be articulated. Is the word Duty without meaning; is what we call Duty no divine messenger to be followed, but only a Law to be imposed out of Desire or Fear? Is it the happiness of an approving conscience? Will not David of Israel go to his child, but will the child of David not return to him, and thereof will David cease to fast in the eyes of the Lord? The Age of duty towards the law has only been given to the Age of disease out of the liver: in the Policraticus the individual is charged with the duty of judging his ruler, and the Fiorian Joachim had moved to unite the saeculum of the Man with the saeculum of the Spirit, yet he has, like all Wanderers hereto far, howled with question upon question into the Sibylline cave of Destiny, and been returned nothing but echos. That impossible mandate, Know Thyself, I translate into the partly possible one, quanto superiores simus, tanto nos geramus summissius, Work Not Against Thine Own Constitution. Nature has taught Man the temperment of ancient Cain, inasmuch that She has also made him the true Aenesidemus: Cain, properly speaking, teacheth the lesson that it is only with renunciation, that life may be said to begin saepe procelloso dat ventus turbine flatum: imbre tacet modico, fit tempus pacificatum, in the preliminary moral act. [Proverbia Rusticorum] Noble plowmen and blacksmiths have there been, ever from Cain and Tubal-cain downwards, but where does the Palladis Tamia of your accumulated Agricultural, Metallurgic, and other skills in economy lay warehoused? Of Man's activities and attainments the chief results are phenomenal, and preserved in Tradition only. Such are the forms of government, with those authorities they rest upon; so are his customs, and all the collection of his handicrafts, and the whole faculty for manipulating nature. The Germans said that Society was merely the Ueberlieferungsgeschichte. Society can be inferred but never beheld; it may be known solely by it's works, and of these must be passed down from Father to Son, and cannot be asked for or fixed under lock and key. Get thee Greek enough to understand: the end of Man is in vitae mortalis honorem and in Action, never Thought, though it were noble; be thou a worthy Aristaeus and pursue bees. He has riches who owns the Day with Deus, Dyaus, or Jupiter. Hast thou considered Earth, the middle-shrine, as Sophocles well names her? You fell suitors of Penelope seek to govern over Nature, to tie your hands in Stoicism and take her up into your own bondages; or rather do you seek to put out your eyes with Epicureanism, for because you dream up your own inspirations you desire to be called a prophet? The senses and the passions understand nothing but images. These first impressions of Light, - creation's Historian - were invested to the whole treasury of human knowledge. Like that solar eclipse which can be observed in a vessel full of water, Hope lies not in the affirmation of Memories but upon the the patefaction and Redemption of their impressions; that is to say, upon the image of a world after the fall of man, - the world as it is in marriage of God with Sin, and not as it was in it's nativity. Thus if in this sudden bereavement of Antheia and the flower-godessesses, is talked of a true Revelations and Dissolution in Nature, - in which light doubtless is partly appeared to the Poet - his own nature is nowise dissolved thereby, but rather is compressed closer. We are withheld, as by Anathema Maran-atha, by the God-given mandate Work thou in Well-doing, which lies written in Delphic characters upon our hearts, and urges us ever to, under persons, seek God without rest. Not so easily can the Old Adam, haunting us ante Vulcanum since our births, be dispossessed in sub Prometheo. Necessarily must Philosophy or the moral character, which has become pompous with Society, be informed of it's lack thereof. The Philosopher, who reaches up into his religiosity and his science like a Titan, must be reminded that he but goeth from the finite to the finite, that he must learn to become small, that he must die. Whilst the God-given mandate leaves us without rest, til it's Gospel be deciphered and obeyed, it must have competition with the living kerugma of our clay, namely, to eat and be filled. He that from Cupid's cup of nectar drinks, hath Love uneducated, which for itself competes. Equally, be it of small consequence to trample the Earth under thine two feet, as the Good Zeno taught thee, for thou art sadly engulfed upon the billows of Time, and burnt up in the pother of matter, awaiting to be extricated into the raptures of Eternity; yet to await in peace and love of the Earth, a greater then Zeno is needed. What song the Syrens sang, were ostendit sermo mores animumque latentem or questions before philosophy. Who shall speak or sing of Eternity and Silence, to which altars may yet be risen by Men? By Aristaeus' extensive insight into physical things, he knoweth better than he can remember, - that the wind blows where it will - though one still heareth it sighing, yet one still judges from whence it comes, and still more, whither it goes. If Necessity find a bottom in the uncomprehensive deeps of Plutus' gold, than it surely were the mother of invention: every individual Truth grows into the foundation and euthynon polin of a plan, more miraculous than that ox-hide became the area of a city, and a plan more ample than dilatet Deus Japhetum, [Proverbia Salomonis] whereby the hemisphere, -et cognata iacent generis sub legibus astra - may be said to contain the tip of a point of view. We had borrowed the stallions of Euthyphron, and this is Man's transgression; namely, that he had presumed to come within the oracle of knowledge; and in consequence thereby, had inferred God to be at work in the great and in the small, in the Heavens and in the Earth; and in further consequence, that every creature were equally shared in the divine measure, for all things were given before the Judgment of God. For Lucifer had not presumed to come within the goodness of God, but his aim rather was in supremacy, - and he presumed only that he may be like unto the Highest, as in the authority of God's ministry. The Origin of Evil becomes at last no more than a political epigram, or scholastic chatter. Bacon writes an allegory in which Learning is compared to a lark which, at it's pleasure, may mount and sing to please only itself; yet Learning rather may take after the hawk if it should prefer, which can soar aloft and descend to strike upon it's prey: thus shall the observational mind condescend from it's spheres velum Timantis in mathematics to the little horizon in the Philosopher's moral atmosphere, whereafter the confusions of the Chinese and Egyptian horoscopes for the present form of our earth will be rectified as in that window of Momus, through which the angles and recesses of the human heart may be made out, and Fate and Providence be dispensed with. A healthy theanthropism were our orthodoxy, wherein we hold ourselves fast, as in Fiedler's Aphorismen aus dem Nachlass, to tie up the cape of this World. Do the elements of epic memory, (Gedachtinis) - that is, the disparate traditions which are shaped into poetry by the mythologizers, - lose their natural meaning, if they remind us, in the infinite combination of their arbitrary signs, of the carnal image of the palaios anthropos (Eingedenken)? The Areopagites of the neological persuasion will always find in the midst of gaps and lacks the ξηαλανοτηαγου of compensation, [Mutian an Urban in Zeitschrift des Vereins] and raise the whole meritorious justice of a Homer upon the corpse of his letter. Epic memory is the perisseia of the ecstasis which was the kolasis at the beginning of history. The highest gift we have received from Nature is life; let but Eternity, which is the spiritless being, look more or less visibly, through the Time-Figure (Zeitlichkeit) ! Then are men fit to unite there, for of this are all true works of art: wilt thou discern Eternity through Time, how certain Illiads, or generally how the Homeric epos, after three thousand years, yet find new significances with Man? If thou would plant everlastingly, then plant not into the old Tyconian civitas diabolis of ours, which divides the Dead from the Unborn, plant into the deep faculties and Religion of Man, plant into the basileian charadochesantes, [Synesius in Anecdota Hemsterhusiana] not into the healthy arithmetic and superficial understandings of Man. For another matter is it, if your symbol has intrinsic meaning rather than merely extrinsic; the Greek Herkules had no peremptory Duty, but a choice - and for the Greeks he was no balance of pleasures and pains, but a needs betraying weaknesses - but if thou wilst conceive of how far the human mind has carried a Symbol, then look upon Jesus of Nazareth, ecce homo. Ut pictura poesis; ut poesis historica. In Symbols does Fantasy play into the prose domain of sense, and therein become incorporated, inter Orei cancros adhaerere. In this uncritical phase of Philosophy, the Symbol is taken to be the very expression of reality, a daemonic image of the world. In this theoretical image of the world, no criticism of the Unpoesie of the astronomical nature, or of the senses has been undertaken. As yet the empire of the sky figures is not looked for under stones. Ever in the barest of existence there is a sheen, either of Love or of Madness, which gleams in from the circumambages of Eternity, and paints in it's own own hues our little holm of Time. Since Death must be our Abelmizraim of Life, to be presently alive were to lay obscure in the chaos of Prae-ordination, and night of our fore-beings, nocturna Dei tempora sunt, atque diurna. [Scaliger's Epidorpides.] Time and Space are woven for us before birth itself, to clothe our tedious being for dwelling here; for because it is a tedious being that can un-wish itself, after the malcontent of Job, and it is by accustomation to living that we are indisposed to die. All minor illusions present themselves upon this our omnipresent canvas or, to borrow a term out of Palligenius Stellatus, inane amplum - of high vanity you will endeavor, while here on Earth, to cast them off; as Job, humored to have so far been, so as to be entitled to continuation, in a hidden state of life, and as it were incrimination, you will at best make Alcmenas nights out of adversity, to cast off by labor Space and Time in moments only, whereby to renew the senses of an hour. Custom is the greatest of Weavers, and weaveth air raiments for all the Spirits in the Universe; wherein, as under Hamman's "Polytheism in the Stars", they dwell visibly with us, even as kyriological servants, in our houses and in our workshops; yet their natures have, for the most, become forever hidden, are left but husks or even echini spiritus retentio. [Apostolius Clavis Homerica] Whilst the Poets bides tentative with these visible natures, whilst the Poet at the beginning of days is the same as the Thief at the end of days, the Volume of Nature remains closed unto him, and the Poet is left without God: then what were Philosophy but a struggle against Custom? If the Platonic school sought to ground the Eternal by means of the Transient, then it is the object of the Transcendental school, being that it has transcended the blind sphere of Custom, - of Space and Time - to ground the Soul by means of the Spirit, - to make the natural darkness and earthly nature of Man the bearers and interpreters of Man's Glory. [Constitution of the Church and State..] Our Life is compassed round with necessity, yet is lacking altogether in Ethica more geometrico demonstata: Man is pressed to learn that moral striving does not remain isolated to itself in Freedom and Voluntary Force; that he must cease to eat his own heart, following Tasso. Man must throw himself outwardly upon the NOT-ME, if he is to get any wholesomer nourishment. The whole of Humanity's achievement and chevisance is somewhat aerial and mystic, and preserved in Tradition only, which is the element of human life: Human Life ever publishes itself in thesaurus omnia rerum whilst, from an ever-fading past, men are still touched by the echos of a metaphysics of the ethical that we long ago given up to the realm of dreams. Hence the Ionian art reflects the Asiatic, and the Doric art reflects that of the Egyptians. If Man is considered, under the Stoic conception, to be a Dios Talanta unto himself, then the Society into which he lives, weaves, and is - is the transcendental Moira, to which he must depend, is fitted to manipulate, and therein becomes. Ever The Idea of Natural History, like a quivering fremitus, makes itself known to the Heroic Heart, just as the seeing eye of the earliest times seest into those of the latest. In the appearance of Tradition, the deciphered meaning is precisely the transcience thereof. So the spiritual man, as Capaso Formae, is surrounded and embraced by a living Communion of Saints as wide as the World itself, and as the History of the World. Religion shows us that there is in Man a demens genitricem occidis Orestes or internal confusion, that there is a man before and after the Fall: that the doctrine Know Thyself, in the Epictetian or Aurelian sense, is the recantation of Man. Though Man, as animal bougonia, infinitely surpasses Man; this doctrine is ineffectual in point of philosophical anthropology. Religion is not offered as a theoretical solution to the problem, though the incomprehensibility and darkness which it has been accused of will become it's highest praise, when it's true aim is considered. What this true aim relates is a Saturnine and obscure story, namely, the Sin and Fall of Man. The Sin of Man cannot be necessitated by any natural cause, and therefor cannot be articulated under the usual methods of philosophical investigation. Hence the interminable controversy of the Origin of Evil. Our Conviction, though it be taken out of the Poet in the Georgics, of a quite Protean Neptuno visum, is worthless, till it convert itself into Conduct, and Cyrenian praecepta : till a certainty of Experience be found, upon which speculation may revolve, man is as yet fallen, and bereft of the living God of Belshazzar's Wall. Man has ever expressed some philosophy of his Being in his Works and Conduct; he announces himself and his Gospel of Nature which, like the morning light, wakes up the statue of Memnon. Though, about the Grand course of Providence, man may know nothing, or almost nothing; for the final courses thereunto deal mysteriously with him, as out of Ephesians, - hyperballousan tes gnoseos agapen - Love, whereby Man is known by Man, and Men are made brothers, is mystery itself. Justus Lipsius affirms in his Politica, that succession is in itself an obstacle to disorder: thus much has become evident- Mankind is advancing somewhither; that all human things, as being construed in Time, and existing by virtue of Time, are given to Movement and Change, which tolerate him howsoever, like a yawning Gamaliel. In some provinces, as in the Economic and experimental sciences, this discovery has long since been talked about, yet in most others it is peculiar to these latter times. How, in former ages, by eternal Creeds, eternal Forms of Government and the like, has it been attempted, with destructive violence, to chain the Future under the Past. Man's task here below, the destiny of every individual man, is to be in turns Apprentice and Workman; or say rather, to be Scholar, Teacher, Discoverer: by nature he has strength for Learning and for Imitating, but also a strength for acting, for knowing on his own account. An Arabicus tibicen seems poured into Man's senses. Could you ever keep man a Scholar merely, so that he had nothing to discover, or even to exegetically correct; could you ever establish a System und Erkenntnisfreude or Theory of the Universe that were entire, unimprovable, and which need only be put to heart; then would Man, who properly is conceived on the basis of an ars inveniendi, be spiritually defunct, and the species which you call man would cease to exist. As Miasma is displaced by infectious disease, as Ptolemy's Almagest and Euclid's Elements have both been superseded; so does monarchy give place to democracy, and perfection of practice, like completeness of opinion, is ever approaching yet never arrived. To understand man, however, we must look beyond the individual and his activities or interests, and behold him at work with his fellows; partes Epimethei etiam ad Prometheum rite transferri possint, the lightning-spark of Thought, generated, or say rather heaven-kindled, in the solitary mind, however Prometheus-like, awakens it's express similitudes in another, and all minds begin to work together in Epimethian constitution. It is in Society that man first feels what he is, wherein he becomes what he can be, for properly he is only half alive on his own, and his only Faith, if faith it may be called which Faith is none, lies in Hunger. Yet through Society has an entirely new set of spiritual activities evolved within him. The duty of man to himself makes up the First Table of the Law merely: to this First Table is super-added a second, namely, the Duty of Man towards his neighbor, wherein Morality enters, or at least takes an altogether different form, in it's necessary application to political and economic science. Well might the Ancients make Silence a god; for it is the element of all divinity, of all transcendence; at once the origin of all Sadduceeisms and Phariseeisms, wherein at once the Manhanaim-dance of this World is ended. In the same sense, too, have Philosophers written of the kenosis of God, wherein there is such a miracle of infinite silence, that God is made to appear as nothing before Creation. [Golgotha and Scheblimini, Hamman.] Though, never-minding the Amyntas, let us not complain that we have 'fallen out of our own youth' for if Silence were made a God by the ancients, it is at least, for us moderns, a Government cornicular, or prothonotary. Thus in all Poetry, Religion, Art, Society, as one form passes into another, nothing is lost; it is but the superficial, as it were the body only, which like the mortal Shulamite grows obsolete and dies; under this lies a Muse which is immortal; a Soul which anew incarnates itself in fairer revelations. Hosts of polities, sciences, and schemes of government ascend to the pure firmament of Society, and those hosts of ethical theories, philosophies, and moralities which have been judged unworthy, descend upon the wide varieties of archaisms and superstition, all upon the ladder which no man dreams of, whereon even the Greatest of Social Homers nods. Not beams of Cedar, or roofs of Cypresses for my Shulamite; nor lyre, but a besom for my Muse, who is set to winnowing, and tending to the barn of Holy Literature! How then shall we devour death in the pots of Egypt, and the garniture thereof make tasty for the children of the prophets? Like the Poet Orpheus, who has anxiously cast his eyes upon Eurydice who walks behind him, only to see her vanish; thus are we with the ancients. Just as if our knowledge were a mere reminiscence, or ingenii omnium mortalium multum debilissimi, [Eumathia Ad Euopsiam Comparata] so are we ever referred back to the monuments of antiquity, to edify our minds with memory. Why continue to use the broken cistern of the Greeks, when we, like Aristaeus, may start upon the clear waters, and living wells? System of Nature! To the wisest of men, wide as their vision may be, Nature remains of quite Zodiacal depth, of quite indeterminate expansion; and all Experience thereof burdeneth itself to some few computations of centuries, and measures of square-miles. The course of Her phases, on this our little mole of a planet, is but partially known to us; as yet no one has a clue to what deeper courses upon which these depend, what infinitely larger Cycle of causes our little epicycle turns upon. Patriarchies and Dynasties are as the days of Man's sufferings: death and birth are the Hesperus and angelus, that summon mankind to sleep, and to raise refreshed for new advancement. Nature were but περισσεία or the kingdom of death in old aeons: in the Time-vesture of God, she hides Him from the foolish and reveals him to the wise. What the father was made, the son can make and enjoy; but He has also work of his own appointed him. Plato, who was but the Moses Atticus, or Philosophic Homer as Cassius Longinus calls him, had learned to see of what the Chaldees, or the Egyptias had seen, but there is also a fresh heaven-derived lex Rhodia in Plato, for he must mount to still higher vantage. Blind Necessity, which we call Fate, is the element running through entire nature. Properly, what we call Fate is that which interrupts the organizations of our Will; as Death, the needs of the body, etc. Fate overburdens the Prometheus Vinctus of man not with pain only but with injustice. If we are brute and barbarous then Fate takes on a brute and dreadful shape, if we are juvenile then Fate is our calenture and it seems that Avalon hath rolled upon the face of the waters: yet if we rise to spiritual culture the antagonism takes a spiritual form, hicne hominum casus lenire et demere Fatis. Though by what means shall we raise the extinct language of Nature, to read whereof the Depth saith it is not here, the Seas saith it is not with us, and Death saith that it hath heard only of the fame thereof? Alas! in thine own bougonia do thou exchange death for life, and are but returned the bees thou hadst lost, advanced no whither. Your steer will become alternatively your sacraficial offering and your idol, and behold thou has not sacraficed to the Gods, but to nothingness; caeterum nullam solidam nec eminentem effigiem sapientiae consectantur, with Petrus Cunaeus. Ei tis pterôsas Kleokriton Kinêsiai, airoien aurai pelagian huper plaka; when we what faithless is do faithful hold, and what is faithful faithless: [Aristophanes, Frogs.] The opinions of the philosophers are readings of nature, the precepts of the theologians are readings of scripture. The author is the greatest interpreter of his words; be thou the venerable Palamedes, whereof thou has recognized the living God to superintend and speak through creatures, through events, and through fire and smoke which comprise the holy language, inasmuch as Damascene's conceives of the Spirit and the Word. As Light resteth upon the darkness, as it's First Historian, so one day tells another, and one night makes known the other, who's call ranges over every climate, even to the ends of the World. Blame be where it may, outside us or in us: in Nature we have only a babel of verses; sperate deos, memores fandi atque nefandi. The Torch of Moses illuminates even the mental world, which has it's own Heaven and Earth, and an Imitable thunder in precedence of Virgil's Inimitable thunder: kruptos anthrupos te kardias (which Peter calls the mother of man) were but an Hieroglyphical Adam, wherein the whole history of the race is comprehended by a Symbolical Heaven, whilst the beauty and the Character of Eve is but an applied Economy, and lies in the very entrails, or kidneys of the Earth, and Eve herself makes use of our deep sleep to pluck from the rib of Endymion, to publish the new edition of the human soul in zoologia theogoniae.
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Ascolo Parodites
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PROTOITHIKOLOGIAS:
A CRITICAL EXPOSITION.
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The first part of this work is devoted to man's Sin in terms of it's immanence to the human condition, that is,to a philosophical account of fallibility. In maintaining that Sin is immanent to man, I am from the outset presupposing that pure reflection, - our ways of understanding things before the image, symbol, or myth, - can reach a certain threshold of intelligibility where the possibility of evil appears inscribed in the innermost structure of Humanity, whereby the reality of man is reduced to a reliquarum virtutum. The literal and grammatical, the carnal and dialectic, the philosophic and historic are Orphean to the highest degree, and depend on such arbitrary, critical and secondary, momentary, or human conditions that one cannot obtain the key to their knowledge without ascending to Heaven; and must shrink from no journey across the sea or in the regions of such spirits who, since yesterday or the day before, for thousands of years, have uttered and believed mysteries, of which the Universal World History has given us hardly as much information as Echo, that with her laconic memory, could hold at once. Though, "Hope lies not in the affirmation of Memories but upon the patefaction and Redemption of their impressions; that is to say, upon the image of a world after the fall of man, - the world as it is conceived of in God's marriage with Sin, and not as it was in it's nativity." Redemption is not to be apprehended in the antithesis of man's history with Nature, but in the comprehensive secularization of the historical in the state of creation. It is not eternity that is opposed to the dejected chronicle of world-history, but the restoration of the timelessness of paradise.
With these allusions in mind, such as to Echo, to the critical nature of the carnal and the dialectic, of the philosophic and historic,- a second hypothesis becomes evident: that fallibility consists in a kind of non-coincidence of man with himself, and that this non-coincidence of man with man is the logic of human fallibility. A few instances of this non coincidence have been given, but now we shall intimate ourselves with that one between history and nature. I have already written in the Protoithikologia that "This nature, human nature, is not obvious but concealed,- is written upon the head like the mark of Cain, ex analogia veterum. " Man, interposed with these two elements, or say rather extremes, of History and Nature, realizes them in their essential meanings, only through a kind of Platonic reminiscence on all the analogies between the intelligble and the sensible. Man thus can conceive of the intelligbily infinite only as a parturition within the endless varieties of nature,- and of the infinitely small, that is, of nothingness,- as the principle which is hidden from him, and that from which he himself has come; (as the writers of the Athenaum discuss) that from which the crisis of history arises. (Hence the Philosophers of Athenaum concern themselves with the fact that history has nothing to do with genesis.) Thus the non-coincidence of man with man, in this case, consists in man's inability to embrace at once the principle of his own existence and that principle of life itself. Is this "misery" which is comparable to the wandering of the pastoral poets, who engraved their verses upon stones, trees, or on the sides of mountains, as a true hominum vestigia video, or to the wandering mortals of Ovid's Pythagoras, who act out the rites of the Cyclops, and devour the animals, the so called compaions of their own labor, - a cardinal wound of the human condition, or, as Pythagoras thus contends, our fault? We may take the old Pascalian doctrine of faith as an affirmation that our misery is our fault and belongs unto us, as it is presented in the form of dissimulation: Pascal remarks that man must learn his range; that he exists between an inconceivable birth and an incomprehensible nothingness, that he must dwell upon his own poverty and wickedness, and that nothing can comfort him of this poverty, and thus grounds his faith in a kind of diversion from human fallibility into the inconsolable. Pascal conceives of this diversion in terms of an aversion to man's fallibility, whereby the natural feeling of one's miserable condition is no sooner conceived than banished. In other words, Pascalian faith consists in the preservation of a kind of remnant or secret instinct of our primitive nature through a dissimulation of our miseries, conceived of in terms of an aversion towards or dismissal of human fallibility which teaches us that happiness consists only in rest and not in turmoil. Thus from these two contrary instincts, that of Pascalian faith; which preserves a remanant of our Edenic nature through a careful dissimulation of our miseries, wherein we were perfectly happy,- and of this aversion to the obviousness and truth of our fallibility, is formed a confused project in the heart of men, which compels them to seek repose through excitement, which causes them to imagine that the satisfaction that they do not have will come to them if, by surmounting whatever difficulties confront them, they may open the door to rest. This conception of faith represents only the viciousness of human existence, and does not explain man's misery in terms of Aeschylean justice, in terms of tragedy, in terms of righteous and Christological sufferance. This notion of Pascalian visciousness explains what we mean by "evil" through an illustration of the non coincidence of man with man, and of the dissimulation of the human condition, but it does not explain Sin,- the origin of evil,- in terms of tragedy, or in Christological terms, and in terms of it's immanence to the human condition.
This notion of Pascalian viciousness gives philosophy the substance of it's meditation, but not it's point of departure. How can we pass from the Historian's mythology of omnium gatherum, from the rhetoric of religion in terms of the dissimulation of the human condition, to philosophical discourse,- from mythos to logos? The necessary, although quite inadequate, stage of philosophical transition is the Transcendental. We shall soon see why transcendental reflection does not satisfy the demands of a true anthropology, and to what extent it remains deficient in comparison to the anticipatory comprehension of man that found it's first expression in Pascalian faith, in the form of a remnant of Edenic, pre-historical nature. But transcendental reflection itself will reveal it's own insufficiency. The application of transcendental reflection is twofold. First, it lies in the choice of a point of departure: it searches for this origin in an examination of the powers of knowing. Of course transcendental reflection does not reach the point where it can actually affirm a point of departure; it merely, though again necessarily, illustrates the properties of thought, thus making a point of departure possible. This Philosophy anticipates the representation of thought to itself by virtue of a third term which Kant undertakes, to reveal synthesis as consciousness,- to reveal consciousness itself as the representation of thought to itself genetically. The fundamental categories of anthropology, including and above all those which characterize action and feeling, would not be anthropological categories if they did not first undergo the critique of a transcendental reflection, that is, an examination of the power of knowing in terms of genesis. In what way does the possibility for a point of departure concern us? In that the first disproportion liable to philosophic investigation is that one which the genetic power of knowing brings into view. What was omnium gatherum and viciousness for the pathetic understanding of man is now called synthesis in Kant's philosophy; thus Kant's project is the representation of the genetic thought to itself in terms of a consciousness. Representation in Kantian philosophy is identified with judgment itself, as either a synthetic or a-priori judgment. Strictly speaking, representation is the third term, the intermediate; either in the form of a schema, as in synthesis, or an image or symbol, as in a-priori judgments. One might wonder how a reflection on the intermediary function of the imagination, in terms of a transcendental imagination, in the Kantian sense of apperception, can concern a philosophy of fallibility. We find the second application of transcendental reflection here: transcendental reflection, if it is to describe thought genetically, to make a point of departure possible, must begin conterminously with a "thing" or, properly, an object; for it is upon the object that the transcendental reflection must first discern the power of knowing, in terms of a reception from the object or world and a determination within the self, or in Kantian language, without the object or world, in terms of the synthesis of genetic thought or consciousness. The true difference between scholastic and modern thought is now evident: the scholastics understood things in terms of their structure,- since Kant we have understood things genetically, in terms of the genesis of thought itself. But this transcendental reflection is not introspection; for reflection is upon the object, not within the subject. This is the way in which it is property transcendental: it brings into view on the object that in the subject which makes synthesis possible. This investigation of the conditions of possibility of an object's structure, this genetic thought, breaks with the Pascalian faith and introduces the problem of disproportion and synthesis into the philosophic dimension. But the limitation of this reflection appears directly with it's strength: the synthesis which it reveals and inspects will be a synthesis only in the object, in the thing; a synthesis that is merely intentional and projected into the object, into the world, into the structure of objectivity which the object makes possible; in other words the synthesis, which is nearly synonymous with consciousness itself in Kant, is incompatible with it's own representation in terms of schema or symbol, in that it is expressible only in terms of it's intentionality. This inability to conceive of the consciousness in terms other than intentionality is, in other words, an inability for Kantian philosophy to account for the plurality of experiences, and consequently the multiplication of identities. Kant certainly has comprehended the consciousness, but has not approached the self consciousness, and consequently anthropology.
Protoithikologia schematizes the words of Horace in one of his Epodes to the reality of God's providence, which preserves or neglects the works of the ancients. The possibility of philology is located within Faith, not within a methodical hermeneutics grounded in reason; for the Philologian is like the poet who has sent for marble from across the seas merely to build his sepulcher. The idea of the metaphor is quite clear, - if you have wasted two bushels of lentils in trying to throw them through the eye of a needle, you should not mourn not having a third. Equally the misuse which the scholars make of the ancients - since they do not recognize them as clouds of witnesses, or as a 'communion of Saints wide as the world itself ' makes quite irrelevant the fact that a third bushelful of ancient works is missing; it would be wasted as the scholars attempted to achieve the impossible, namely, to divine the works of the ancients without relation to God, and therefor to an absolute humanity conceived in the image of God and realized through Faith. Should God have bothered to provide the philological circles with another bushel of ancient worls, it would be as redundant as those books which are at once available to them; and one would have to throw them overboard to keep up the price of those already on the market, as the Dutch were said to have done with their spices. It is the non coincidence of the literal with the grammatical, of the literal with native language, that is responsible for the accumulation of such an immense capital or abgrund of poetic forms. The desire for the restoration of this capital harbors an idealogy of collecting and appropriating the past and mastering it as an object of investigation. This idealogy is motivated by the fear of losing to the imperfections of memory those poetic or grammatical artifacts by which human beings as agents of history defined themselves. This restoration emerges from the deepest immersion into tradition. It is never a creation ex nihilo, but the effect of translation and interpretation, not of collection and appropriation as for the Romantics. Taking up a prominent notion of fourteenth and sixteenth century aesthetic theory, namely, that the imitation of nature means the imitation of nature as it is shaped by God, Protoithikologia metaschematizes the idea to the concept of history as mythology. Neither Critico-analytic or Empirico-descriptive methods can exhaust the meaning of history; indeed, it's meaning cannot be discovered in either of these ways. As the imitation of nature, for the Romantic poets, meant the imitation of a nature in the hands of God, so historical nature, - just like material nature, in the vein of Goethe, is given as a repository of the totality secrets, or in the words of Walter Benjamin, das Gedichtete. Whilst the speech of self-revelation is heard across every climate and in every dialect upon the earth, yet - for whatever reason, the rupture of sin, or the nature of Man's own fallibility, we cannot simply read off from the world of nature the being of God. Just as Nature was not seen by the romantics in bud and blood, but in the fruition and decay of her creations; seen in her eternal transience, so it is only within that saturnine generation out of nature's eternal transience that history is recognized. Thus a constructive principle may be said to underly materialist historiography; but a constructive principle at the heart of a system made to represent and to account involves destruction. History is reduced to chronology, and chronology reduced to this romantic ideology which, like Chronos, murders it's own children in the tiger's leap of analogia veterum into the thickets of the once. [Bacon, "man, because he lives in a world of relations...is subject to continous analogies.]
Whilst we "wrestle with the Idea of Natural History, under the carnality which we cannot efface" God has decided, after all, to reveal himself in the unclean and imperfect world of material; his revelation is a sensuous one. The condition of possibility for the theology of revelation is a doctrine of sense-perception; of "Images and Passions" which explains the latter as our insertion into the world of imagery and sense, our locus of relation or "memoria baptismi" to it. The Idea of Natural History is referred to as something wrestled with under an uneffaceable carnality.
"Careful! The next age shall awake from it's stupor in the books of palling ancients, and the kolasis of history, to exult your Muse and give to her this message: your flesh is of my flesh, your bone is of my bone. "
The fundamental controversy in biblical hermeneutics that is presupposed by the polemic of Protoithikologias is the distinction between the sacred and profane. From the kolasis of history, - the disaster of trying to efface the animal nature, with it's passions, which have thus far been denominated as necessary for the idea of faith in an absolute Humanity and a God (which is used to harmonize the philosophical, religious, philological, and sociological aspects of this essay,) - the next age shall awake, recalling the image of Endymion in the form of a redeemed humanity, to exult to the muse this message: your flesh, (referring to those now under the kolasis, - who are guilty of trying to efface the animal nature by recognizing it as the profane,) - is flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone; ( a true protera tun azuma: Meletemata Sacra, p. 476.) In other words, the pagan and sacred texts are to be interpreted in the same way, that is, as if they were written by the same author and through the same Muse. viz. they are alike to be interpreted analagously to human nature. The gradual eclipse of the Cratylic and Adamic into the Hermogenean ad placitum ceases: the original language which contained the nature of things is discovered through analogy to the absolute human nature which is realized only in contemplation of the image of God in which man was created.
"One may observe for himself the manifestations of the passions everywhere in human society; as everything, no matter how remote, strikes upon the mind in a certain affect; as every individual sensation extends over the compass of all external objects, blowing up every laical situation into a public spectacle of heaven and earth, vacuam palpant onerosa mole metretam." [Beronici Georgarchontomachia]
If the passions are signacula of Man they are intrinsic to being human, and therefor in the conception of humanity absolutely in relation to God; likewise the Sin and Fall must be immanent to humanity. Human passions are the predictable driving mechanism of the creature - that is the final item in the inventory of knowledge which had to transform the dynamism of world-history into political action. The importance and salience of the passions, and of the human interests, are visibly extended into all our activity: our propensity to appropriate what is universal, or remote, and apply it to ourselves, and to contrariwise extend our personal experience over the whole of the human world, to portray everything as similar to ourselves and to spread our portrait over the whole of nature in veritas moralis. [Compendium philosophiæ ad usum seminariorum, auctore Sti Sulpitii, page 23.] Every insight is extended into a larger world view; every grand system contains the tiny point of someone's perspective. Thus Philosophy must not attempt to deny that it reawakens beauty in works, and "blows up every laical situation" into a "public spectacle out of the Earth and the Heavens." The geologist and botanist can and indeed do awaken feelings of beauty for their landscapes, as well as the astronomer for his view of the heavenly bodies; - for without at least an intuitive grasp of the life of the detail and structure, all love of beauty is but empty dreaming, - the vacuam palpant onerosa mole metretam of a recitator acerbus. The object of both philosophical and philological criticism is to show that the function of the artistic form is to make historical content, such as provides the basis for all important works of art and philology, into a philosophical or literary truth.
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